


Time Has Told Me

by Zigzagwanderer



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Curses, Dirty Talk, Hannibal is vampiric in a non-traditional way, Love, Magic, Porn, Smut, Will tries new things, fairytale, general nastiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 06:25:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 7,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16213319
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: This was kind of for Halloween? Kind of a vampire fic? Maybe?Just remembered to add it to the VampireHannibalFest!By the way I am on Tumblr.......@zigzag-wanderer. Thanks to everyone who has read/commented/left a little heart. I am so grateful to you for putting up with me.xxxhugsxxx





	1. Chapter 1

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_The story, of course, begins with a curse. Honed, hating, it arcs like a chasing spear between the burdened boughs and iron uprights of the forest, haunting the small, sinking footprints of its quarry._

_As the ringed moon harries out the sobbing creature, shivering in his false cradle of roots and deadwood, it strikes._

_And yet, so sly is the prick of it, that he is at first entirely unaware that his innocence has been excommunicated; that he is blighted, that he is no longer merely an extraordinary, red-eyed little boy._

_Before the curse, spewed out so carelessly by those slobbering, biting men, there was family, and rosehip syrup in milk, and odd pockets of oblivious contentment._

_Afterwards, there is only hunger, or maybe, more precisely, thirst._

_An Emptiness, inside._

_The men know exactly what they have done to the boy’s family, but not what they have done to him; they are merely furious with the scrawny little pot-rabbit for escaping, and have spat after him the darkest words they know, the half-forgotten spells of their heritage, of every heritage, the world over. For every language has the power to hurt, in one way or another, and there are always new maledictions crowning the old._

_Eventually, the annihilators give up on the pursuit and return to their unholy feasting, and their stolen fireside, and they assume that the fugitive will merely make cold, overwintering bones._

_But they are wrong._

_The child survives._

_Although, what comes out of the nest of mouldy twigs and snow, is not at all the same as what went in._


	2. Chapter 2

“You never eat much.” Will Graham accuses quietly, in the dim sanctuary of the dining room. 

Dr Lecter has been considering his guest, and covers his inattention, or rather, his extremely close attention, with a taste of antique wine. 

“Forgive me,” he inclines his head in apology. “I have a peculiar appetite.”

Will has partaken of the hundred-dollar broth both grudgingly and gratefully, as he does with everything that Hannibal offers, whether it is a philosophical reflection, or the best of whiskies, or a comforting hand placed upon a trembling shoulder. 

“One might be tempted to think,” Will stabs at the many dishes with a jagged look, “that you only go to this trouble to please me.” 

Hannibal, surprised, decides to reply neutrally nonetheless, because he has been in search of the perfect prey all of his aching, restless years, and hunting is his habit. 

“Even if it is possible, Will, to empathise with Stammet's motivation, the events of today were traumatic. If my role is simply one of…support, then a decent repast may have greater worth than any amount of clever conversation.” 

Will nods slowly, and swallows, and Hannibal watches, finding in the motion of lips and cartilage a curious respite from the ever-grinding ache of the Emptiness. 

“This work...” Will is as pale as the cracked bones, the spiking orchids, the crooked shells that adorn the centre of the table. “Jack has us both mired in his world, his dirty, damaged world. I have to be there. But you…” Here, Will stops again, hesitates, then continues. “You could talk your way out, Hannibal. Before it gets worse. And I’d see to it that you weren’t blamed for that, I swear.”

“No.” 

Dr Lecter lets the word drop, like a clove, or a star of anise, significant and balancing, into the clear, music-velveted air between them. He shakes his head, firmly. “I will not abandon you, Will.”

“But the ugliness…if you can’t get used to it, it’ll destroy you. And if you can?” Will manages to raise his eyes to those of his host, and the connection affects them both. It always does. “Maybe I don’t want that for you.”

Hannibal reaches across and touches Will’s hand. 

He knows, intimately, viciousness and horror. 

They are two old friends he regularly has over for dinner, and it has always been an amusement to invite the great and the good, the church and the law, to sit, unknowingly, alongside them at his fine table.

So, it is strange that this Special Agent, of all people, can so easily sweeten the mordancy with which Hannibal salts his pottage. 

It has occurred to Hannibal, quite recently, that maybe love is the delicacy his Emptiness truly craves. 

“I would willingly become accustomed to this,” he replies, less carefully, because Will’s very scent is an emboldening balm upon his gnawing agony. “And as for lack of loveliness? Might I not be permitted to discover something…beautiful, amid all the pain?”

“But what if… _it_ …isn’t lovely. What if… _it_ …isn’t fascinating at all. Not like the things you’re used to.” Will turns Hannibal’s home over, somewhat jealously, with his gaze, which then returns to his empty plate.

“You are, Will.” Hannibal has dished up honesty before he can compose something more epigrammatic. “At least, you are, to me.”

Will smiles, suddenly. “How reassuringly unprofessional, Doctor.”

“Indeed,” Hannibal feels, fleetingly, fulfilled. Will’s fingers lace into his. “So, what is to be done about that?”


	3. Chapter 3

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_Nothing at all sates the Emptiness._

_That is the lesson._

_Not the living, pulsing things the boy tears apart through that first winter, alone and changed, the ice-bruised land a shambles in his wake, his skin glowing ivory because the darkness has become his playground._

_Not the soft-feathered sweetlings, which he slaughters even as their mothers’ wings beat about his head._

_Nor the fanged pack-leaders, the pride of the deepwoods, which he takes and takes again, until the entire kingless company slinks, snarling, back beyond the mountains._

_No matter how the boy crams his gullet, no matter how cruel or frankly formidable the kill, the Emptiness remains, a constant, wriggling worm in his belly._

_Making maggots of his marrow, making his bones battle against one other, making of him rags, and sinew, and hate._

_But, those long months in the wilderness are not without use._

_The last of the Lecter line learns strength, and stealth, and how to endure the pain of the ravening inside, and the physical mechanics of how to make death happen._

_Wondering if revenge is the special ingredient his soul lacks, the boy returns home with the spring, and hobbles the men who lie, in their filth, in his parents’ bed._

_Amongst his parents’ bones._

_But even their begging does not satisfy, and their rank blood, hot in his mouth and throat, just makes him sick._

_Desperately, the child samples of them, organ and filament, screaming and silent, but nothing, nothing serves to succour._

_The Emptiness remains._

_Sullen._

_Taunting._

_And, when the thaws allows, his rescuers find him, feral and mute, scooping up a porridge of boiled brains with a crested, gold-plated spoon._


	4. Chapter 4

“You have embarked upon a relationship. With a patient. An empath. A _policeman_. Is that wise, given your…preoccupations?”

Hannibal brushes what he suspects is a dog hair from his trouser leg. “As my therapist, should you really be counselling _against_ forming affectionate attachments?”

“I am an occult advisor,” Madame Bedelia corrects, gowned in scarab-blue. “And you do not require a boyfriend, Hannibal. What you require is hex management.”  
“You prescribe only palliation now?” Hannibal’s tone grates against the fetishes and the glittering crystalline refractions, rips at the gauzy drapes and incensed atmosphere of the consulting suite. “Where once you foresaw a _cure_?”  
“I diagnose danger in drawing such a man close, given that your…quest has stepped you so far from innocence. I am quite sure that your epicurean experiments would be greatly compromised by a lengthy prison sentence.”  


“I eat and eat to seek an end to the unendurable…”

The witch blinks across the room at him, and he wonders what she sees.

“Is it still, truly, the Emptiness you feed, Hannibal, when you butcher and crow? When you incite others to misdeeds, to pass along some smug shadow of your pain? Or is it your own vanity you nurture, these days? Your own self-pity?”

For a moment, Hannibal is back in the black thickets of an ancient estate. Alone. Savage. With clot-stained nails and chick-down between his teeth. 

“My curse…”  
“…is an abstraction, Doctor, an idea of evil, let loose by ignorance.”

Madame strokes her garnet jewellery as Hannibal rises. His eyes and her rings are the same; glittering, iced-blood brown. Both contain fatal poisons, and both are aware of the potential potency of the other. 

“Traditionally,” she continues, “the victim is supposed to retreat from the world, not terrorize it. Surrender. Starve themselves to extinction. That is what the Emptiness wants. Yet you have had the temerity to survive. You have embraced the madness of it, deliberately. One could say, with relish…” 

Hannibal allows his hands to close once, briefly, pleasurably, around the seer’s slim, tattooed neck, and then, as the inked glyphs burn into his palms, he lets Madame Bedelia breath again.

She coughs, pointedly, upon release, and he passes over to her a refilled goblet of oily wine. 

The du Maurier residence overlooks a curiously ever-silent street, and Hannibal walks stiffly over to stand there, looking out and watching the cats congregate around his parked car.  
His custom paintwork will, no doubt, pay for his loss of control in scratches and defecation.  
He places an extra money-clip of tribute in the collection plate.

“So,” he straightens the cuffs of his suit. “Let us be clear; is it now your professional opinion that an antidote will not be found for my _malison_?”  
“The key to reversal could be…anything.” There is a shrug; a witch can be as opaque as a scrying pool. “An undiscovered element? A prayer in an extinct language? A particular pebble on a particular shore?”  
“No. The answer lies in a…substance, something that can experienced. Consumed.” Hannibal repeats it for the thousandth time, to himself as much as to whatever other entities listen through Madame’s ears. “For as long as I can remember, this I have known.”  
“You do not possess _knowledge_ of these matters, Hannibal. What you have, rather sentimentally, is _faith_.” 

Bedelia finishes her drink, doggedly, and pours yet another. “And we cannot confirm your theory with the originators of the imprecation, now can we?”

Outside, Hannibal’s car alarm starts to shriek.

Madame smiles into the gently roiling liquid in her glass. “Because, unfortunately, you ate them all.”


	5. Chapter 5

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_In Paris, in the bleached bowels of the sanitorium, Hannibal dreams that it was his sister who got away, and that it is he who is being consumed. Continually._

_He sketches it for the doctors, when they ask; her tiny, crockeried heart bled out, making off like a white winged thing, skyward, immaculate and unharmed, while he is always, always, scratched out, crumpled up in the end within a paper oubliette of starvation and despair._

_The Emptiness he charcoals in heavily, right up to the edges of their rectangular world._

_They say that he is recovering well._

_His money sends him to school, where he cannot kill so easily, among all the immortal, mortared marble._  
_So, he suffers.  
_ _Grows detached, fills himself up with contempt for those who do not live with such constant inanition. Refines his senses to sniff or to lick out any hint of the thing that will bring an end to his torment._

_He is bullied. Has bravery beaten into him. Becomes a bully.  
Then, he reads Machiavelli for the first time, and saves himself many a dry, black eye. _

_But, there is no out-politicking the Emptiness._

_It continues to prod and pitchfork at his insides like a vengeful peasant, bellowing bestially, growing as Hannibal grows, until his voice breaks with it, and the pallid little boy is reset in the outward cast of a suavely cultured, gentlemanly youth._

_He is very popular. He is very handsome._

_He chooses medicine as a career._

_Obviously._


	6. Chapter 6

“You have to be kidding.” Alana has, perhaps, not heard Hannibal correctly.  


From her position, between his legs.  


He repeats his announcement more clearly, and Alana stops kissing her own flavours from the lipstick-reddened length of him, and sits back on her heels. Her eyes, that were lately so wanton, narrow like a nun’s.  
Sweat runs between her breasts.  
Hannibal bends forward to lap familiarly at the moisture, but Alana crawls away to the far corner of the bed. 

Away from that terrible, terrible tongue of his.

“Will? You’re going to be dating _Will?_ But that…that’s absurd. On every level.”  


He frowns, but mildly. “Your prejudices seem a little hypocritical.”

Alana and Hannibal have been colleagues, lovers; there is no reason why they cannot be friends.  
Except that an amicable dissolution of their arrangement is not part of Hannibal’s design _at all_. 

So, he flicks the lash.

“Do not mistake Will’s natural modesty for reluctance.”  
Alana clutches up her silk things. Stares.  
“Did you just call me easy?”  
“Enthusiasm is nothing to reproach oneself about.” Hannibal thrusts casually into his own sticky hand, to underline the point. 

Then he pauses, and re-aligns his features into something approaching compassion.  
“Oh, my dear.” He drips with concern. “Forgive me. I did not realise that this was in any way…meaningful for you. It was _never_ my intention to mislead.”  
Dismay unmakes the satiny surface of her brow. Rage wrinkles it next, a shaking-through of emotions that ends, predictably, with the grim folding inward of self-doubt. 

Hannibal resists licking his lips. 

Indignant tears splash behind the bathroom door.  


Hannibal absorbs them all. Every drop of spilled regret. The flowing anxiety. Sour sparkles of shame.  
He stands, naked, on the bearskin rug, with his eyes shut and his body open.  
And the ever-present gnawing of the red, red Emptiness calms to violet and then to blue.  
Blue of a ribbon. A curved petal in a young girl’s hand.  
Colour of a favoured sea, discussed over yesterday’s picnic lunch. Blue of the eyes that meet his now, more and more often.  
Alana leaves. The Emptiness is dulled, gorged upon her disappointment. It is a remission, only. But a welcome one.

Hannibal sits down on the chair. Taps his fingers on the brocaded upholstery.

He is trying, very, very hard, not to think of how Will would taste, in tears.


	7. Chapter 7

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_There is no way to say it nicely._

_The Emptiness likes pain._

_It adores Hannibal’s agony, of course. It scratches at him, working over his many wounds, until suicide seems like a dear friend he has snubbed for far too long._

_But, it will accept other, less personal fare._

_And Hannibal learns early on that such meat can be obtained at very little cost to himself._

_O, how easy it is, to buy and break the human heart!_

_To turn a mind around and around, until moralities are no more than muddied clay; malleable and grey and streaked with scarlet. To spin a soul and watch it go._

_Tears sweeten its temper, so Hannibal wines and dines his bane, his companion, his Emptiness, among atmospheres of adversity._

_Morgues and Emergency Rooms. Operating Theatres and Psychiatric Institutions._

_More recently, he has taken it to visit the circus, where Uncle Jack’s troubled little troupe performs._

_Hannibal can and does bear such a life; forlorn of colour, textured with terror, with sobbing, and with the endless feeding._

_Where satiation always seems but one silvery tear away._

_After all, he tells himself, as he wakes to find the Emptiness clinging to him like a lover, it is a life which has, eventually, led him to Will._


	8. Chapter 8

“Strange,” Will patiently unfastens the hook, “that you should be so very hopeless at this.”

He is rescuing the false nymph that Hannibal has made such a ruin of, and he chafes his bottom lip in concentration, aware that his pupil is now free to lean back and watch. 

“Shall I demonstrate my dexterity in some other way?” 

Hannibal’s voice touches Will’s skin, at the nape of his neck. It is _invited_ to do so, by the way Will dips his head, showing what lies between collar and curls. 

“Sure.” Will finishes up and pushes away the arm of the rig. “There must be some manual work you’re good at.” 

He regards Hannibal, steadily. “Any therapist will tell you it’s considered…beneficial, in times of stress, to focus on a physical act.”

Hannibal nods, slowly, and passes Will some of the disgusting potato chips he brought over. 

They go sit on the couch. 

Outside, black feathers are falling, come to brush away the light. 

The interior of the house is intimate, yet it is also held wide open at windows and door, propped that way with books and boots. 

They listen to critters mating mournfully amongst the encircling woods. 

Logs melt together in the meagre fire. 

They both look straight ahead. 

Hannibal has murdered Beverly Katz, earlier that heat-hounded, heavy afternoon. 

She was too clever, and too close, and by now, butchery is Hannibal’s pastime as well as his painkiller; in lieu of family, he feels he must protect something. 

“‘It is the right of a man to defend his hobby’.” Hannibal speaks almost to himself, in the voice of the Emptiness, out into the framed darkness. 

“Take me to the opera, then. _‘Robert le diable’_ is…well, I heard it was on at the Lyric.”

“Certainly.” Hannibal stirs, and allows Will to see him; to see his surprise, to see his pleasure. 

“We may yet be compatible,” he adds. “Despite what has lately been implied.”

He asks Will for aspirin. It is a long drive home. 

And Hannibal is hurting, unto his very innards. For Beverley was Will’s friend, so Beverley was spared much, and the Emptiness has, today, gone unfed.

“Yeah. Well.” Will frowns. “That’s not really any of Jack’s business, now is it?” He stands and sidles past, his legs brushing Hannibal’s legs. “Be just a minute. Don’t go anywhere.” 

He detours to the rain-speckled porch, and shoos Winston and Paddy in, but then encourages them on to some other part of the house. 

When he returns from the kitchen, he has forgotten the pills, but has rinsed his hands. 

He sits back down and is very nearly in Hannibal’s lap.

Hannibal smells him; crackling with heat, and piney, like an ember. 

“Thank you for this evening, Will. And for establishing that tying flies is, as they say, not my ‘thing’.’’

“Which begs the question; what _is_ your ‘thing’?”

“Ah. The fisherman casts his line.”

“Sorry. That was an…inelegant attempt at seduction.” Will starts to withdraw. “Coquetry is clearly not…”

Hannibal kisses Will. As he should be kissed. Pulling Will close by his hair. Putting his tongue in Will’s mouth, hungry and ungentle. 

“Jesus, you’re strong,” Will stops for a moment and the two men look at each other. Will digs his fingertips into Hannibal’s shoulders. “Kiss me like that again. Like I’m what you need to survive.” 

Hannibal pauses, barely. 

“Will. Forgive me; you have no wish to be rushed…”

“I know what I said. I’m scared as all hell.” 

Will kisses Hannibal, fierce but slow.

He bites down jerkily, and suddenly, there is blood. 

“God. Seeing you at work, with everyone fawning, and falling at your feet...You make me crazy.” 

He stares at Hannibal’s smeared chin. “Well, crazier than usual.” 

He licks and licks, lower, biting and sucking, right down Hannibal’s neck. 

“I want to put marks on you.” He takes off Hannibal’s tie and undoes his buttons. “I want you to miss me. I want to hold your goddamn hand when we walk six blocks to get your coffee from that stupid place you like.” 

He nudges Hannibal backwards, so that he can deal with belt and trousers. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, you know that, right? Maiden voyage, and all.”

Will wets his palm and hesitates and then slides it deliberately over Hannibal’s cock. 

“Is that…any good?”

Hannibal is trying not to beg with his hips.

“Why, yes,” he says. 

Will glances up, raising his eyebrows. “Uh. Are you going to…participate?”

Hannibal realises that he is sitting upright with both arms bent out, as if being held at gunpoint.

“May I…undress you?”

“I guess so.” Will lowers his lashes. “Please.”

Hannibal is made virginally incompetent by lust. He tugs the plaid shirt down in order to mouth across Will’s shoulders but hasn’t undone the cuffs and so they have to start over again.

“Finally…” Will sighs, and he is right there, he is bared and heavenly. Sensitive. Responsive. He flushes in Hannibal’s arms. Sweat seeps out of him, and Hannibal tastes it from Will’s upper lip and underarm and then runs his tongue along to where it slickens the crook of Will’s elbow. 

They kiss, over and over, until Hannibal’s lips are sore; Will’s beard is rough, and full of wood-smoke. 

He also has fine, long muscles, pretty wrists, and intoxicating, soap-fragranced creases. 

Hannibal wants to come all over him. Fuck him inside out.

“The sounds you make…” Hannibal rubs his cock along the groove adjacent to Will’s hip. 

“Sorry.” Will pants, pulling down Hannibal’s trousers further, to the ankle. 

He is twitchy. Nervous. Hannibal does not care; he is a rod of iron in Will’s uncertain grip. He shuffles onto his knees and shakes his head. “No, Will. Make more of those noises. And say my name.” He manhandles Will to be more directly underneath him. “Say it often.”

Will breathes the laughter out. “Am I..? I mean, Hannibal, am I…?” 

“You are indescribable. In all aspects. I could easily hate you for it.”

“But you don’t,” Will tells him quietly.

“No.” Hannibal murmurs, and pushes back a tangle of hair from Will’s face. “It seems that I do not.”

He fingers around the base of Will’s cock, greedily straying lower, thumb pushing in, nails dragging. 

Will moans, obediently. Raises a knee. 

And scrabbles his feet, mindlessly, for purchase. 

“I…uh…Jesus…right there, Hannibal. Yes.” Will puts his hand with Hannibal’s hand, exploring between his own legs. He trembles as Hannibal slides in nearly a whole, saliva-slippery finger. “You’re...experienced. I don’t know if I’m ready to…yet.”

“Hmm. Say that again.” 

“Uh..?”

“ _’Yet’_.”

Hannibal straightens and spits over both of them.

Works his fist loosely up. Then down. Will’s prick is hot and red. 

“I want you. I want you all over me.” Will shifts his weight. “Yes. Hannibal. Oh, _Honey_ …”

Hannibal blinks. 

“Fuck. Hannibal. Don’t stop.” 

Will mirrors him, using one hand, then the other. He tests a couple things out. 

It’s good when they’re laced together, fingers meshed around them both. 

“Tighter,” Will whispers. “I won’t break.”

Hannibal wordlessly does as he’s told. 

They come to terms; the rhythm found and the placing of their bodies where they need to be. 

“And when we do…that…” Will arches his back. “I will…fuck you too.”

Hannibal smiles, at last. “Good. I would expect nothing less. Tell me, Will. What will we do?”

The clouds push down. Thunder seems likely.

“You fuck me and I fuck you.” Hannibal holds Will’s gaze. It is like holding the shifting sky. “Everything equal, ok, Hannibal? It’s you and me. Even Stevens, now.”

Hannibal grits his teeth, against the storm.

“No games with this.” Will has the gall to squeeze, hard, around Hannibal’s cock. For emphasis. “Suck me, and fuck me and I’ll goddamn learn how to suck you and then maybe how to take you just with my fingers, right inside you, babe, and you can show me, you can do it all back to me.” 

“Certainly, Will.”

“Come now as I come, ok?” 

“Yes.”

“Now, Honey? I’m gonna come, babe.”

“Yes.”

They are exceptionally compatible, as it turns out. 

And they do come, quickly, but with the shared feeling that it is only something to whet the appetite, and that there is more to follow. 

Will gets them tea and a cloth and Hannibal enjoys walking around the undraped windows, covered only in Will. 

He is quite distracted, and the frustrated howling of the Emptiness seems to have lost its edge for the time being.

Which is more than acceptable. 

The telephone rings as they decide to get into Will’s bed.

Hannibal has been expecting the call. Sooner, or later.

Will picks it up.

“No. Right. No. _No_.” A pause. “He’s with me. I’m fine to come in. You are completely sure...Yes. Yes. No.” 

Hannibal holds Will and appears adequately upset. 

There are, honestly, no words he can think of to say, as tragedy drains the joy out of Will completely. 

They clean up and dress and Will gets his car keys and makes a few arrangements. 

Hannibal watches. Helps Will into a coat, and catches him when he stumbles, felled by shock. 

“She must have found something out.” Will wipes his face over with his hands. 

Hannibal thinks him very beautiful.

“She had to have become a target. The goddamn Ripper? Beverley was so smart. It has to be that. Not an ordinary gangland slaying, like Alana said.”

“I will take you to Brian. I am sorry. I liked her.”

Will pushes himself closer into Hannibal’s arms. He wraps himself in Hannibal, under, over, chin hidden in the soft, expensive, cologne-scented fabric. 

And Hannibal finds out, right there, right then, that he is, indeed, in love. 

It is an amazement. 

The Emptiness fades. To almost nothing. 

Hannibal cannot comprehend what is happening, so abrupt is the cessation of his pain.

Until Will tilts up his chin, and Hannibal sees that he is crying.

The Emptiness smiles and smiles, growing smaller and smaller, sly and sly and sly, until it is as quiet and docile as a little lamb.

Hannibal touches the wetness of Will’s cheek. He rejoices and he laments, for it is here, right here; his grail, his salvation, his cure.

All there, for him. All there, within reach.

All there, in Special Agent Will Graham’s tears.


	9. Chapter 9

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_Hannibal forgets virtuosity. He forfeits art._

_He stalks the city, from slum to citadel, and he is that ruby-eyed little demon again, clawing through the frozen guts of that war-bitten corpse-land again; unholy child of rage and rancour._

_He kills. And kills. And kills._

_And, as before, he favours wolves._

_Abel Gideon is an old friend, and is collected up as if he were no more than a parcel of laundered shirts; Hannibal unstitches him at the seams._

_He picks out and unpeels a pair of predators, one from the other, daughter dishonouring father dishonouring daughter, until the cabin walls are strewn with their carrion._

_And Mason Verger, in the end, begs to become swill for swine._

_For cruelty is now all that tempts Hannibal’s palate, and mercy has never yet sweetened tears to his taste._

_So, he laps at the corners of wet, dead eyes. Paddles his palm along cold, streaked cheeks. He valentines his hungry hex with unsparing tortures, lustrously lachrymal and rose-petalled with gore._

_But, even so, it is simply not enough._

_It all curdles within him, every oblation of salt and blood._

_And the Emptiness, thwarted, decides to show him what inhumanity really is._

_Will is spared by Uncle Jack for a weekend away; the Emptiness goes too. And it hurts Hannibal, relentlessly, as he drives them to the cute little coastal inn, it hurts him badly enough so that he has to pull over and vomit up the spiteful acid of it._

_And the Emptiness becomes not just the spectre at the feast, but the spittle in Hannibal’s wine, the maggot in his cassoulet, the members of hotel staff that mutter at him and Will, every time they smile or touch or kiss._

_They go to bed. The Emptiness slips in with them, between their sheets. Between their sweating bodies. Hannibal can feel that it is so._

_And in the end, Will grows weary of the hostility and worried about Hannibal. They leave early, and, as they check out, the Emptiness winks at Hannibal, from behind the cracks in the receptionist’s skin._

_It is a clear evening. Stars chase down the sunset._

_Hannibal is being allowed a glimpse of how things will be, if he continues to be stubborn._

_So, blankly, bleakly, Hannibal feigns a stumble in the car park and pushes Will into a wall. He is profusely apologetic about the accident and Will is more concerned about Hannibal’s greyish colouring that his own scoured cheek or bruised head._

_Even though Will's eyes are watering with the pain of the blow, so harsh and sudden, against the bricks._

_Hannibal leans forward, and kisses away Will's tears._

_And Will laughs, small and shakily, and tells him not to be such an overprotective ass._

_Hannibal licks his lips, and repeats how very sorry he is._

_And close above them, invisible and wretched, I have to watch, as Hannibal begins, gradually and gently, to break Will Graham into pieces._


	10. Chapter 10

“Take him home, Doctor Lecter. I’d feel happier if somebody was watching...out for him.” The growl lacks granite; Jack’s kingdom is karst, now, and they are all tired from treading so carefully around the sinkholes. 

Blood contaminates the tiled landscape. 

Hannibal binds Will’s hand with a square of ultramarine. 

Will is shaking, his reserves eaten away by the acid of mistrust. His suffering is deep, yet delicate. 

It has been a very bad few weeks. 

Except for Hannibal, who has never felt better.

Zeller and Price are heaviest of foot; they are a six-legged creature that has had its two most graceful limbs dissevered. Their report is hollow, brittle facts crumbling away to show blame beneath. 

And so, Jack has thundered. The intern was told to get out. Alana sits with her back to them all. 

In the end, Will simply stops arguing his innocence, and he takes up his satchel and coat and the keys to the Bentley and he slams the laboratory door shut behind him, muttering something about waiting in the car. 

Jimmy winces, and starts picking up pieces of broken clipboard and shattered ceramic. 

The silence holds loyalty itself suspended between those that are left. One word more and suspicion will irretrievably crack into open accusation. 

“A moment in private, if I may?” Hannibal can outwait even Jack’s obstinacy.  
“Fine.” Jack walks him, eventually, along the off-white corridor and into an empty room. 

“Officially, I have granted Special Agent Graham a leave of absence.” Jack takes the chair behind whoever’s desk it is. “But make sure he stays where I can find him.”  
“The accrued evidence is highly circumstantial.” Hannibal states this with certainty, for Hannibal himself has made each small, forensically-ambiguous arrow that is now pointed so unwaveringly at Will. 

He has helped people to draw their own conclusions.  
He is mildly nonplussed as to how it has taken this long for Will to be implicated.  
To be doubted. To be isolated. 

To have even more reason to cry, so deliciously, on Hannibal’s shoulder. 

“Agreed. Yet, what we have is compelling. I can’t ignore it.”  
“And motive?” Hannibal smiles politely, genuinely interested in the answer. “Why would our friend commit such atrocities as the so-called _Annihilator_ appears to delight in?”  
The other man leans back. “You know, I thought I did good, Hannibal. I thought I had recruited a dream profiler. Only, it seems that Will Graham is, in reality, a profiler’s dream.”  
“Poetic, Jack, but hardly accurate. Will is no more sociopathic than you or I.”  
“Does he still have blackouts?”  
“Not since he was successfully treated for encephalitis. As his evaluations show.”  
Jack sighs. “Does Will know that when you were treating Abel Gideon he became obsessed with you?” 

Hannibal tilts his head. The rest of him is still. He rarely shows surprise; it is not usually productive to appear unprepared. “I consider patient confidentiality to be sacrosanct, so no, he does not.” 

“Ms Bloom hinted pretty strongly to me about that, and also that you were once on intimate terms with the Vergers.” Jack’s tone is meaningful, if not judgmental. He examines the blotter in front of him. “These things get around. Romantic intrigue and whatnot. Will is a hell of a lot more invested in you than I am, Hannibal, and I found out just like that.” He clicks his fingers. 

The door opens. Closes again, quickly.

Hannibal loosens his grip. He has been holding the back of the chair nearest to him, tightly. With both hands. “If you are positing jealousy as a trigger, it presupposes that Will Graham is…in love with me. More so than just an ordinary…dependency of some sort.”

His voice remains quite even. 

“I don’t think there is a word yet made that covers how Will feels about you, doctor. And I should know,” Jack adds, dust-dry, “being a poet and all.” 

He glances up when Hannibal fails, for once, to respond. “Well, well. Seems Bella was right about you being a smart-assed idiot.”

Hannibal continues to say nothing. 

“I should really be removing you from the investigation, given that look on your face.” Jack spreads his hands. “But, without Beverley, without Will…”  
Hannibal hardly hears Jack’s discourse on staffing issues.  


The government building must be well heated. It is, after all, late in the year. But at that moment, Hannibal is cold. Through the layers of silk and fine fabric, he feels the cumulative chill of a winter forest, a sanatorium, a series of lonely houses.

He supresses a shiver.  
It is Hannibal’s understanding that places such as the BSHCI are kept deliberately icy, as a means of control.

He stares over Jack, at the trees outside.  
He thinks of Wolf Trap, with its fireplaces and its fields and its broken fences, and he is not certain that Will would do well in captivity.  
If it comes to it. Which it might. 

Survival. Hannibal has survived. Cannibals and curses and cruelty.  
But it is, perhaps, nothing more than a habit now, this wanting to live, at any cost. 

“May I beg a favour?” Hannibal blinks, unable to tell if he has interrupted anything important.  
Jack closes his mouth and stands, warily. “Ask away.”  
“The dates in question. When you would wish to know Will’s whereabouts. His alibi for specific times. Please assume that he was with me.” Hannibal speaks firmly, despite the sharp stirring of the Emptiness inside him. “On any and all occasions. Day or night.” 

Jack taps his knuckles on the polished wood. “Perjury is a serious business, Hannibal.”

The Emptiness snarls faintly, displeased. It flexes its claws. It raises up its head, its want, its anger; Hannibal tastes blood in his throat. 

“So is love, it seems,” he tells it, and walks upon broken glass, towards the door.


	11. Chapter 11

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_On the day that I died and was eaten, I had earlier slipped my hand into the white-fanged brook and pulled out a little pebble, glistening blue and curved like a sugared pear._

_My brother smiled, and called it magic. He dried my small fingers on a loop of his scarf and kissed my cheek._

_It was true; I had a way of finding treasures._

_Fox-bones that danced when I hummed a tune._

_Beady berries to crown our hair, blinking like bright crows' eyes amongst the dark gold._

_Troll’s teacups from under green-wet logs, that, when sipped from, put sparks in our heads and made our chattering tongues trip over our teeth._

_After they took us, those cave-mouthed men, after my brother had fought and lost and I was in the pot, the Tear fell to the flagstones and broke beneath their bloodied boots._

_The men shivered, and did not know why._

_But, by then, I was snowstar, I was pine._

_I was the colour of the air, the wolf-knot caught on a thorn._

_I was everywhere and I was nowhere._

_I was wherever my brother was._

_From high and from low, I saw him run. I saw them chase him, and I chased him too, for I wanted my brother back._

_Angry, frightened, unseeable, alone, I reached out as those men reached out, and I sang their curse along with them; I sang it for them, it seems, and I felt the strength of it grow from my witch’s throat and leap out into the world._

_By the time I realised what I had helped them to do, the hex had found its home in Hannibal._

_Lachrymae. Lamia. Lamenta.  
Lamenta, lamia, lachrymae._

_He loved me, and I made him a monster. I loved him, and I was made to witness the monstrosity he became._

_O, how I have hated, since that night; hated myself for cursing him, for cursing myself to witness him cursed._

_For, if love alone could set me loose, then I could not be unlocked, for monsters cannot love and be loved, except by the Emptiness itself, which was all too soon Hannibal’s sister, his sport, and his spouse._

_So, for forty years I hated Hannibal, until Will Graham came along, who, try as he might, did not._

_I saw them, that day, from low, from high, the two of them sitting there together, in the big car, holding hands, outside the place where they tried so very hard to understand death._

_I saw, as they drove all the way home, to the field-stranded ship of a house, that Hannibal had decided to let love win._

_I saw that he had decided to die. To starve himself of Will's sadness._

_And, just like that, I was free._

_No longer sun-slant, no longer grass._

_No longer the smell of dew, nor yet a brown beetle upon the porch._

_I felt myself leaving, at last._

_And all because Hannibal had been changed._

_And I wondered what else could be changed._

_Perhaps that which could never be cured._

_And as I became gone, like a starfall of snow in the slanting sun, I opened my witch’s throat and I sang;_

_Lachrymae. Lamia. Laetans.  
Lascivia. Lamia. Lachrymae._

_And I saw Hannibal look up, once, into the ghosting clouds above, and I heard him say, “Mischa.”_

_And for both of us, it was goodbye._


	12. Chapter 12

“Sorry.” 

The fleece of gold is lost, the temple flooded.

“You have disappeared our towel, Will, and displaced an entire element.” 

Hannibal needs assistance to get out of the slope-sided cedarwood tub, and Will flushes, betrayed; despite his solicitude, he has been steadily hardening as he rinsed off both blood and sweat.

“Sorry,” he repeats.

Hannibal kisses away all contrition. 

“Never apologise for that, Will.” 

“I wanted to help. We should call someone. You were bleeding from the _eyes_.” 

Will holds up their stained clothes. Hannibal watches, fearful that Will might start to get dressed. 

“And you were burning, Hannibal. Like ice.”

It was, by any measure, a crude warning. The hex, stamping its cloven foot. 

Hannibal wonders what other indignities it will inflict. 

How long it will take to kill him outright.

“You ask plenty, but you never answer a single damn question.” 

“To save you from harm.”

“That might not always be possible.”

Outside, the rain drills down. 

Hannibal stares at Will’s back. It gleams in the stormy afternoon light, and Hannibal wants him, badly enough to die for it, slick and undoubtedly seething as Will is. 

“A malfunction of the lacrimal duct?” It is a lie, offered, eventually. 

“If you say so, doctor.” Will gets up and walks out of the house. 

Hannibal counts heartbeats between the thunder, a game he has not played since Mischa was alive.

Uncertainty. 

The space from one note to the next. 

The endless interval between blows. 

For a man accustomed to the sharpness of the spur, it is surprisingly provoking; this thing, this love. 

The Emptiness screams for its supper, but Hannibal makes it as far as the open veranda doors without collapse or capitulation. 

“That for me?” Will takes the counterpane from Hannibal, and it slithers and snags across the wooden planks. The white starts to soak up mud almost immediately; it reminds Hannibal of the inside of an apple, turning brown. 

It reminds him how swiftly decay can come to all things sweet.

“Messy out here.” Will reclines. He has picked up a dead flowerhead, the same colour as the liquor in his glass. “I like it.” 

“It is a little…rustic for most guests.” 

“Yeah…well, I can’t be in… _there_. Alana described your ceilings and carpets, from certain angles, with great specificity...” 

“Ah. I see.” 

The trees around the edge of the garden are folded down by the downpour, a parade of dark parasols. Hannibal cares little for nature, unless it affords privacy.

“Perhaps we should relocate, then? You will be exonerated soon enough, and we could elope, together, whenever you would like.” 

Will looks up. His lap is full of plucked petals. 

“Should we go North?” Hannibal continues. “Lakes and mountains? Or south, if you prefer. Into the sun?” 

“I’m not...You can’t mean it.” Will sloshes the tumblerful around, to encompass _everything_. “You have a successful practice.”

“Treating a person is not the same as caring about one.”

“You’re on Jack’s team.”

“I am, fortunately, not susceptible to emotional entreaties, Will. And if Jack required my loyalty, then he should not have accused you of being a serial killer.” 

Hannibal crouches, and wings his hands across Will’s bare shoulders. “Houses and hobbies can be relinquished. My only _requirement_ for living, for the rest of my days, is you.”

Tongue on rain on skin. The beating of an artery. 

The storm itself slows down around them, silver chains loosed from the black hulls anchored above. 

Hannibal takes Will’s vertebrae into his mouth, one after the other. He feels Will rattling apart beneath him.

Nape to tailbone.

Pressed down, like a broken lily, into the thick silk. 

“You have to tell me things,” Will murmurs, drugged by desire. “Like if you’re sick. Or if I’ve pissed you off. Or if you finally decide to fuck me.”

Hannibal stops, then, completely. 

“Very well. I was born to a place where certain…conditions are yet to be eradicated. The modern world might regard them as…curses.”

And there it is; a twist of the truth.

Will sits up and breathes out. “Ok. Well, we’ll need to get you to a specialist, right?”

Hannibal agrees, knowing there will be no time left to do so. 

“And…I’ve been drinking your fifty-year-old whiskey.”

“Oh? I am…annoyed about that.”

“Thought it might work as an analgesic?” Will raises an eyebrow. “I’ve read…that… _it_ can hurt…” 

Hannibal blinks. 

“I got this. Nothing fancy.” Will gives Hannibal a gift, his cheekbones darkening. “Kind of picked up whatever was right there at the front of the display.”

Hannibal would generally disdain such a brand, were it not for the thought of Will, in a drugstore, purchasing lubrication for them. 

“You mean for me to…?”

“…fuck me. Yes. I mean for you to grease me up and fuck me.”

Hannibal has to concentrate. The Emptiness treads over old and dirty ground, it whispers temptingly of past partners, of courtships of control, where the sting of satisfaction can be earned by all parties, with training. 

But pain is not what Hannibal wants for Will.

He toasts the terrible retaliation inside with the garish plastic bottle. “To health and happiness, then.” 

And he glides from nipple to rib to cock. He rucks up the counterpane and stacks it beneath Will’s hips, and he kisses Will’s legs open.

“God almighty.” Will crosses his arms across his face, as Hannibal gets him wet. “God almighty.” 

“Wider.” Hannibal licks, and strokes. “Keep yourself spread like that, please.” 

Hannibal is not delicate, for Will is wanting; he wants this to happen, and he shows it. 

There is the beading of pearling rain. And mud. And skies that are breached, again and again, with strikes that go deep into the ground. 

“Fuck. There. There it is, honey. Yes.”

Hannibal slides his fingers in firmly.

“Do you know that I love you?”

“Yes. Christ. Yeah, I do. Fuck me, please?” 

Hannibal does so.

Will bites his neck.

Hannibal frowns. “You are…tight.”

Will answers with his nails immediately, pulling Hannibal up even closer.

“It’s good. It’s you, honey. You feel so goddamn big inside me.” 

Hannibal tangles one hand in Will’s damp hair. 

“Tell me that you love me.” 

He fucks Will gently. 

Over and over.

“I love you, babe.”

Then, not so gently.

Over and over.

“Fuck.” Will starts to pant. “I do. Love you.”

Hannibal winces. The agony is ascending. 

“Harder, honey.” 

Hannibal opens his eyes. Will is crying. 

“Please.”

But not in pain.

“Deeper. _Please_.”

Hannibal tilts his head.

To taste Will’s tears.

To taste perfection.

To taste _peace_.

Hannibal, disbelieving, shifts a little.

Will cries out with pleasure.

The Emptiness bays with joy.

Will cries. 

Will comes.

And Hannibal and his Emptiness drink Will Graham dry.


	13. Epilogue

_(The Narrator speaks)._

_They have a rambling, ramshackle home in the countryside._

_And a smart one in the city, close to the University._

_Will teaches. Hannibal teaches. They hold hands as they walk down the boulevard to get their coffee._

_Their devotion is complete._

_Hannibal feeds upon Will’s bliss even when the Emptiness is filled right up to the brim._

_It is, one might say, his only pastime._

_Will smiles, and looks at his happy husband. A lot._

_Their acquaintances often ask about children._

_Hannibal points to Winston and Paddy, Sabre and Cherie, and Will laughs._

_But, one day, they fill out some paperwork and the man at the orphanage takes them around to the garden at the back of the building._

_I haven’t been there long, but have made friends with a little bird. Will sends us both a friendly grin. I say goodbye to somebody’s soul and run over towards my new family._

_Will picks me up and twirls me into the air._

_I ask if we will have room in the chateau for kittens._

_Hannibal kneels, and looks at me, and says my name, in wonderment._

_“Mischa?”_

_He is older, of course, while I, in many ways, am not._

_But my brother’s eyes are still the same berry-red that I remember, and he still kisses me on the cheek._

_Just like he always did._


End file.
